EV 6 day 12

It is hard to imagine how difficult I found this event in the first few days! I started off insisting that it was a tour not a challenge. How wrong I was. With the inevitable problems with bikes , routes, van, accommodation, there has been no spare time and I have been physically and mentally exhausted. On day 3 I was sure I had bitten off more than I could chew. Here we are about to do day 12 and things are very different. We have settled into a decent routine, we have just had a rest day, and apart from the weather, which is getting wetter, we seem to have things under control- fingers crossed. Bikes have been fixed and serviced and are ready to go. It remains to be seen if my legs are in the same condition! Passepartout has helped ease the pressure magnificently and I now feel confident that I will finish the trip.😁

It was a great rest day in Novi Sad. Passepartout had some time out on a campsite and Laura and I stayed in a small apartment in the centre of town that she had found for us. It is a terrific city people all speak, very good, English embarrassingly, so. It has a very cosmopolitan field and we enjoyed exploring it. We took a bus out to the small wine village that we had passed in the hills on the way in, it is a very religious place, and there were lots of local tourists and children looking around. We found a really accommodating restaurant that serves us the local wines made around the village. We need to get a taxi back!

Rest day over Laura heads back to the UK and gets a car at 8 o’clock to take her to the airport. We bid her farewell jump on my bike to start the next day. A short distance in and we have to cross the border from Serbia into Croatia. It’s a very sleepy post but the guards decide to search our van to be honest they didn’t do a very good job of it but we had nothing to hide anyway. Hey Ho, we are into the Schengen area. Croatia beckons. It’s a nice ride today a bit hilly through wine country. I meet a couple of people who are also doing the EV6 route. I meet Herman the German who has cycled all the way up from Greece -Athens – and is heading home to Munich. He intern had met a Dutchman travelling the other way who is heading from Holland to Turkey. There are some intrepid Travelers on the road. There was also some interesting wildlife to be seen my favourite being a stork tackling a snake. I have no idea if the stork killed it or had just found it.
We pull into the town of Osijek, which is a quaint little place just by the river. We get lucky. I take a place in an overnight car park by the riverbank, Cafes and restaurants abound and we feed ourselves and turn in early.

Novi Sad’s cute little hills – unless you have to ride up them!

Sremski Karlovci

Memorial to the fallen of a WW2 battle just outside Osijek